In bringing you that hard-hitting varanid journalism, one picks up some unexpected morsels of life in interacting with big lizards. There’s even more facets to reptile husbandry beyond the care and stewardship of monitor lizards, endangered Komodo dragons, geckos, snakes, and then their amphibious counterparts like frogs, toads, and newts…

Gal and Dino is one-third each live action, stop motion, and cartoon, and 100% adorable silliness that made me temporarily forget my woes. — Having just finished an anime that’s the diametric opposite of this show, Tokyo 24th Ward which is unabashedly political and full of moral quandaries, I found myself laconically browsing through Funimation’s vast offerings in order to satisfy my inner weeb. After paging past numerous shows with the same old themes…

Making and getting lots of phone calls was a raison d’etre for millions of Millennial girls in particular, but once we hit our thirties, the phone became the equivalent of junk mail. Did this have unintended consequences? — Millennials, especially those of us on the older end who were born in Reagan’s second term, are a generation of many dualities. Duality comes up in so much of my work and I always thought it was just because of a vast amount of personal circumstances and life events.

Traumatic experiences, disappointing patterns, and all-around discontent and disconnect can put you off sex and/or relationships. But how do they play into aspec identities? — I just read a piece the algorithm recommended to me by a queer writer who is apparently frustrated that “cishet people can now just claim they’re queer by putting some gray stripes next to their names, when you’re just like everyone else except you’re traumatized!”

Singlehood stigma, heteronormativity, and aphobia are three peas in the same rotten pod. And it’s time for some debunking. — There’s this thread popping off on Twitter at the time of writing. If you’re on the aspec (meaning that you fall somewhere on the asexual and/or aromantic spectrums), it’s as bad as you can imagine:

Demiromantics and demisexuals often find themselves on opposite sides of the same coin, but we’re VHS tapes in the allosexuals’ and alloromantics’ streaming world. — Aro Week 2023 just ended and I wanted to close it with a banger, although this certainly won’t be my last essay on demiromanticism! …

No, there isn’t something wrong with us. You just think we’re too picky or strange, as if alloromantic people never fit those descriptors. — You know how some concepts are best explained with a Venn diagram where two or more circles overlap? Then there’s the meme about “the Venn diagram is just one big circle” because of complete overlap? Ever since I came out on the aspec, I’ve been revisiting so much of my…

Now that there’s more awareness of the asexual and aromantic sides of LGBTQIA, also called the aspec, many people are coming out later in life. — I came out on the aro spectrum at 37. It was one of those things I suspected when I was 29, when I first learned it even existed. But because I do want a relationship, I love the IDEA of love and romance, and can indeed feel romantic attraction and…

Of all the different aspec identities, demiromanticism is probably the least detected. But you get cues throughout your life based on how people talk to you about your interactions. — Aro Week is full swing, I didn’t even know about it until I saw tweets about it, and it seems like the perfect time to address something I’ve been mulling over since I came out as demiromantic at 37. Duality as been a major theme of my work. I’ve personally…